Iran and Syria are the ultimate winners of this war, while Lebanon and Israel are fighting. Iran and Syria are managing Hezbollah.
Is Tehran emerging as regional winner?
By Iason Athanasiadis
Commentary by
Friday, July 21, 2006
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=5&article_id=74116
Lebanon is under bombardment, Iraq writhes in civil war and Palestine is consumed by strife. Might Tehran emerge as the ultimate winner?
“A Saudi delegate approached me at a Gulf conference recently and explained to me the Arab perspective on Iran,” an Iranian professor said in a recent interview with me. “He told me that Iran and the United States are two elephants. When they fight, or even when they make love, the grass underneath gets trampled.”
If Iran is an elephant and the Arab world is the turf on which it carries out the vast majority of its foreign policy calculations, it makes for a terrifying Middle Eastern future. But this Iraq specialist is confident of his prediction. The holder of a degree from the London School of Economics, he is well-connected inside Iran’s power structure, and holds an enviable track record on the international conference circuit.
Sitting in the high-ceilinged offices of a Qajar-era villa functioning as a Middle East studies institute in central Tehran, he expounds at length and with great conviction upon his theory that Israel, Turkey and Iran are the great powers of the Middle East today. Not one of them is Arab, he points out. As political heavyweights Egypt and Syria did little to prevent Israeli jets from pounding Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, in an unprecedented way, criticized Hizbullah. With Lebanon, Iraq and Palestine in flames, have we arrived at another twilight period for the Arab world?
“The new Iran has emerged in the Middle East and America and Europe are coming to terms with it,” the Iranian professor concludes.
Is this an accurate reading or a best-case scenario premised on Western non-interference with Iran and a turnaround of its weak economy? It is probably a mixture of the two, but indicative of Iran’s regional surge is a little-noticed event that took place last week.
Of all of the past few days’ extraordinary occurrences, arguably the strangest was Saudi Arabia coming down on the side of the Israeli interpretation of events in blaming Hizbullah for the ongoing escalation. In an extraordinary statement, Riyadh condemned the Shiite militant group as the instigator of the current Lebanese crisis. And while Hizbullah is to blame for extending the bloodshed that the Israeli Army has been inflicting upon the Gaza Strip for the past few weeks to Lebanon, the Saudi response probably has more to do with concern at the ascendancy of Hizbullah’s sponsor, Iran, as with events in Beirut.
So it was little surprise that the Iranian Supreme National Security head, Ali Larijani, hurried off to Riyadh the next day for consultations with King Abdullah. These followed talks he had already held with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad about the role his country could possibly play in resolving the conflict. The Iranians are anxious to see the end of this crisis because it has not escaped them that these days we could be witnessing a modest preview of what the day after a possible US-led strike against Iran’s nuclear program looks like. Only then the action would be spread across Iraq, the Gulf littoral, Afghanistan and much of Central Asia.
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Iranian officials have often hinted that they might use Shiite allies and proxy militias in Iraq, Lebanon and Afghanistan to hit back should the West target them. That is what is prompting some analysts to speculate that Israel’s actions in Lebanon are nothing less than the systematic dismantling of the Islamic Republic’s retaliation option. With Israel hitting Hizbullah’s military re-supply network, even as dozens of rockets from what must be a limited stock rain down on Israel, the Shiite militia will have trouble coming out in support of Iran at a later date, especially if Israel has been successful in “degrading” it in the meantime.
Tehran will be relieved to see that despite Israel’s massive military superiority, it has yet to gain the upper hand. Israeli officials have been coy about the fact that, aside from striking civilian areas, Hizbullah has also managed to hit an Israeli tank and an air base. In the immediate aftermath of the Hizbullah strike on a gunboat, the Israeli PR machine played down its impact, only backtracking when it became impossible to obscure the evidence. So adept is the Israeli PR machine, that even foreign journalists based in Tehran have been receiving detailed emails from Israeli officials supplying up-to-the-moment briefings and full contact details.
But Israel’s attempts to spin the conflict in its favor do not obscure the fact that its position is becoming ever more precarious the longer the bombing draws on. Iran is sure to capitalize on that. A well-connected Iranian analyst - with links to Hizbullah and a background as a foreign policy adviser to former President Mohammad Khatami - told me that the big regional winners this time will be Syria and Iran, not to mention Russia and China.
Israel embarked on its attack against Lebanon only a few days after the 50-year anniversary of another military misadventure: its 1956 invasion of Egypt. That disaster proved to be the kiss of death for British and French imperialism in the Middle East. This time, Israeli failure will only hasten Iran’s regional ascendance.
Iason Athanasiadis is a specialist in Middle East politics who often visits Iran. He wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR.